AustLit

'Tim Burstall, the celebrated director of Stork, Alvin Purple and numerous other definitive "ocker" comedies, is credited with shaking the moribund Australian film industry out of its torpor. But long before that, in the early 1950s, he began keeping a diary to record the world of the group of "arties" and "intellectuals" he was living among in Eltham, then a rural area outside Melbourne, where cheap land was available for mudbrick houses and studios, and where suburban rigidities could be mercilessly flouted.

'Burstall was in his mid-twenties, with two young sons and an open marriage with his wife, Betty. Eager to become a writer, to go against the grain, he kept a record almost daily—of the parties and the talk in pubs and studios, about art and politics and sex, of Communist Party branch meetings and film societies, of political rallies and the first Herald Outdoor Art Show. Somehow, while holding down a public relations job in the Antarctic Division and juggling his love affairs and obsession with the beautiful, brainy Fay, he wrote 500 words almost every day. Betty, according to the diaries, kept the show on the road, feeding friends after the pub, milking goats and working in her pottery making bowls and mugs, which Tim sometimes decorated at weekends.

'These Memoirs of a Young Bastard, as Burstall dubbed himself and them, are among the most evocative Australian diaries of modern times. Burstall can write. He has an eye for the telling detail, an unerring ear for cant and pomposity and, most endearingly, an ability to mock himself—always from the perspective of a bloke of his generation.' (From the publisher's website.)

Water Rats is an Australian police television series which was broadcast on the Nine Network between 1996 and 2001. The series was based around the men and women of the Sydney Water Police who fight crime across Sydney Harbour and surrounding locales. The show was set on and around Goat Island in Sydney Harbour.

Inspired by A. B. Paterson's classic poem and set in a fictional Snowy Mountains township called Paterson's Ridge, this turn-of-the-nineteenth-century adventure concerns wealthy cattle-station owner and widower Matt McGregor and his three children, Colin (the town preacher), Rob (played by Guy Pearce), and Danni (the tomboyish youngest daughter). Unresolved sexual tension comes in the shape of Matt's independent, free-spirited childhood friend, the recently widowed Kathleen O'Neil, who returns to Paterson's Ridge with her son after having spent many years in England.

Mini-series tracing the 'untold story' of Abel Magwitch, the transported convict who is the source of Pip's 'great expectations' in Charles Dickens's novel.

Dickens left Magwitch's experiences in the New South Wales colony relatively unnarrated, and this mini-series uses that aspect of the novel to interrogate Australia's colonial past. Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, notes the 'formal narrative parallels that exist between the Victorian novel of the nineteenth century and the television mini-series', but adds that

Great Expectations--The Untold Story was an interesting idea but unfortunately the ABC discovered that it has been thought of already by Queensland writer Michael Noonan, who had published a novel along these lines. Ironically Noonan had previously enjoyed good relations with the ABC (his Patchwork Hero, for example, was produced by the ABC in 1981). The copyright dispute was settled and the series went ahead.

Moran also notes that 'Tim Burstall and Antony I Ginnane, senior figures in the co-production company, International Film Management, had done little in television to that point, being associated more (as director and producer respectively) with feature films, specialising in commercially generic potboilers of one kind or another'.

'Adapted from D.H. Lawrence's story of love, violence and political intrigue, based on his personal experiences in Australia in 1922. 'Kangaroo' - the code name of the charismatic leader of a secret fascist army - brings all his dark power to bear to seduce the writer into embracing his ideas, but the writer and his wife find strength in their love reawakened in the exotic southern land.'

Source: Screen Australia.

The 1986 television series is set seven years after the events of the 1983 mini-series. Stephanie Harper, Australia's richest woman, is happily married to her plastic-surgeon husband. Her two children are now young adults, involved in the Harper 'empire' but with their own problems. The release of Jilly Stewart from prison starts a dramatic chain of events.

Compared on Morris West's novel, this screenplay by Tim Burstall and Ross Dimsey focuses more heavily on the question of land rights and the clash between Aboriginal and settler cultures (in the conflict between Lance Dillon and Mundaru) and pulls back on the romantic sub-plot between Dillon's wife Mary and local policeman Sergeant Neil Adams.

An attempt to re-invoke the popularity that police procedurals had enjoyed a decade earlier, Special Squad was the most expensive program produced in Australia up to 1985 (at $150,000 per episode), yet received such lukewarm ratings that Channel Ten chose not to commission a second series.

According to Moran, in his Guide to Australian TV Series,

it was good to watch, with expert stunt work and special effects. With well-paced narratives, intelligently and nicely worked out situations and plenty of emphasis on the villains and victims, Special Squad was just as watchable and entertaining as Homicide had been in its last series.

According to Moran, the failure of Special Squad lay both in its difference from and its similarity to Homicide. The novelty (of Australian accents and Australian locations) that had helped make Homicide so successful was no longer in play, and 'the sight of tough men (on both sides of the law) made the program [Special Squad] seem very old-fashioned. In addition, the plethora of other Australian dramas on air at the time gave viewers more than enough alternatives.'

The Last of the Knucklemen tells the story of a gang of wild-cat miners living in a camp in outback South Australia. They swear, brawl, gamble, and drink heavily. Central to the story is the conflict between Tarzan, the authoritarian group leader, and cocky, wisecracking, loud-mouth Pansy. This results in a bare-knuckle punch-up at the film's climax.

Tim Burstall's response to Hal Porter's criticism of Burstall's adaptation of Porter's film outline The Jetty.

Eliza Fraser tells the real-life story of a Scottish woman, one of eighteen people aboard the HMS Stirling Castle (captained by Fraser's husband) in 1836, when the ship struck a reef and was wrecked several hundred kilometres north of the Queensland island that now bears Fraser's name. The survivors launched a boat and eventually made it to Waddy Point on the island, but they were soon afterwards captured by the local Aboriginal tribe. Stripped of their clothing and forced to endure slave-like conditions, most of the group (including Fraser's husband) either died from starvation or were killed by the tribe. Fraser was eventually found by an escaped convict, John Graham, who had lived for six years with the local Aboriginal people. Graham is said to have won the confidence of his captors by accepting their customs (including nudity). The film's narrative sees Fraser return to 'civilisation,' where she makes a good deal of money in carnival sideshows telling a sensational version of her experiences.

A thriller set around two brothers (one wheelchair bound and obsessed with crossbows, and both with too much leisure time after inheriting a substantial sum from their father) whose involvement in the disappearance of female hitch-hikers around their home town is questionable and sinister.

An exploration of conflict between university-educated middle-class liberalism and self-made working-class values, Petersen sees an electrician and former Aussie Rules football star make a life change by rejecting the 'suburban' values of his former life and 'beer-swilling, ignorant mates' and going to university. He enrolls in an Arts degree and soon finds that his ingenuous, extroverted nature and natural physical aggression make him welcome with fellow students and academic staff alike. He becomes involved in a public demonstration of love-making as a protest against sexual conventions, is involved in a fight with some bikies at a party, and has an affair with a married tutor, Trish. However, when Trish decides to take up an appointment at Oxford and her husband fails him in an examination, Petersen becomes bitter and angered by the betrayal. He subsequently rapes Trish and returns, defeated, to his former career as an electrician.

'With their prize money from helping a team of women cricketers win a match, Alvin and Spike end up in a casino and become entangled in the world of international crime. Alvin then has to cope with gangsters and the continuing attraction he seems to have for women.'

Source: Screen Australia.

Alvin is an average man, except that women find him irresistible. The only woman that Alvin really wants is his platonic friend Tina, but he appears to feel no sexual desire for her. He follows her to a convent, where he gets a job as gardener.

A 'sexist sex comedy', made during the peak of the feminist debate in Australia, Alvin Purple reverses the feminist polemic of men oppressing women by having its protagonist pursued by a constant stream of predatory women. He is victimised even more when he refuses sex. Paul Byrnes (Australian Screen) notes that 'the film was [also] reacting against entrenched puritanical attitudes in Australian society. To some it was prurient farce; to others, it was exposing the repression that produced such prurience.'

Tom O'Regan notes in 'Cinema Oz: The Ocker Films' (1989) that Alvin's 'ordinariness seems irresistible to women. The comedy is based on incongruity. Sex is rendered as slapstick. Jokes are at the expense of bastions of hypocrisy - psychiatry, the press and the law. The would-be recessive hero is the object of male sexual fantasy - sex without responsibility - a fantasy with which women could also apparently identify.'

[Source: Paul Byrnes, Tom O'Regan, and Andrew Pike and Ross Cooper]